[gPXE] New tg3 driver - Call for testers

[Ben Francis]

Excellent. I've been trying to get a bunch of Dell D620 laptops to boot with
gPXE for a long time.

The tg3 driver works for a 5752 card in a Dell D620 laptop when used with
the rom-o-matic ISO burned to a cd. Using Ctrl-B to break to the command
line was difficult, however. The CLI would just freeze up during a download
or just typing in a command. About 15 reboots later, it finally booted with
this sequence of commands:

dhcp net0
intrd http://ip-address/gpxe/initrd
kernel http://ip-address/gpxe/vmlinuz root=/dev/ram0 ramdisk_blocksize=4096
ramdisk_size=140000000
boot

Awesome. Great work.

Flashing to the network ROM chip failed, however.

I downloaded the 14e4:1600 ROM from the rom-o-matic, but when I tried
to flash it with Dell's b57udiag on FreeDOS, i.e.

B57udiag -c 0 -pxe c:\gpxe-1~4.rom

it failed with

insufficient NVRAM space
Needed 62980 bytes, but only 25212 left

Under NVM(avl/max) it shows 64k/256k for the 5752 brd.

Suggestions?

Ben

On Sat, Aug 20, 2011 at 12:07 PM, Thomas Miletich <thomas.miletich at gmail.com
> wrote:

> Hello everyone,
> For my GSoC project I have been working on updating the tg3 driver for
> Broadcom BCM57xx NICs.
> The old driver was still from etherboot and severely out of date.
> The new driver is based on the driver of a recent linux version and
> supports 79 NIC variants, as opposed to the 31 supported variants of
> the old driver.
>
> We don't have hardware to test the fiber PHY codepath, so no fiber
> code is implemented in the current version. If you have fiber tg3 NICs
> and would be interested in helping us test/implement this feature,
> please let us know.
>
> This driver was tested with the following cards: BCM5788, BCM5789,
> BCM57780, BCM5761.
> There is a know bug that freezes the machine with mdc's test card, a
> BCM5701 that we still have to sort out.
>
> If you're interested in testing the new driver, please let us know
> which card you used and whether it worked or not.
>
> You can get images from a rom-o-matic installation from
> http://etherboot.org/meteger/gpxe/contrib/rom-o-matic/
>
> The source can be fetched from
> http://git.etherboot.org/people/meteger/gpxe.git/shortlog/refs/heads/tg3
> The branch tg3 contains the most recent driver code.
>
> If you experience any driver related issues, please enable the serial
> console in
> src/config/console.h, by changing "//#define       CONSOLE_SERIAL" to
> "#define       CONSOLE_SERIAL".
>
> Then rebuild gPXE with the following options:
> make bin/tg3_main.usb DEBUG=tg3_main:3,tg3_hw,tg3_phy
>
> and copy the serial output to http://pastebin.com or a similar site.
>
> Thanks for any feedback!
> Thomas
> _______________________________________________
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>
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